The Best Alternative Rock Albums of the '90s

Nigel Godrich produced it with the band, much of it at St Catherine's Court, a fifteenth-century manor near Bath they rented and recorded in room by room. Paranoid Android is three songs welded together across six and a half minutes, and the hinge is the quiet organ passage that arrives after the second guitar solo. Parlophone released it in the UK in June 1997 and it entered the chart at number one.

Butch Vig co-produced at Triclops Sound in Marietta, Georgia, deliberately far from Chicago and from anyone the band knew, and Billy Corgan ended up playing most of the guitar and bass parts himself. Cherub Rock opens on a filtered snare roll that sounds like it is being dragged into the room, and then a dozen tracked guitars land at once.

Recorded at Gary Young's home studio in Stockton, California, with Young drumming and engineering, then put out by Matador in 1992. Summer Babe buries a genuinely pretty melody under tape hiss and a guitar sliding out of tune, and the noise is the point rather than an accident. Spotify renders the opener as Summer Babe - Winter Version and the title with an ampersand.

John Paul Jones, the Led Zeppelin bassist, wrote the string arrangements for four songs here. Nightswimming is piano, oboe and those strings with no drums at all, which on a rock record in 1992 took some nerve from a band at the peak of its commercial pull. Scott Litt co-produced. Spotify capitalises the title as Automatic For The People.

Dust Brothers production, assembled out of loops and thrift-store records, took the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance in 1997. Where It's At sets a fat organ vamp over a two-note bass and then drops out entirely for the spoken sample that became the hook. Spotify also carries a fifteen-track expanded version; the thirteen-track original is the one linked here.

John Leckie produced, with Nigel Godrich engineering before he took the chair himself on the follow-up. Fake Plastic Trees spends two minutes as one man and an acoustic guitar and then detonates on the last chorus, which is the trick the whole record runs on. EMI put it out in March 1995 and it peaked at number four in the UK.

Steve Albini recorded it at Pachyderm Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, and pushed the drums so far forward that the guitars sound like an argument happening in the next room. 50ft Queenie is Polly Jean Harvey shouting a boast over a riff that ratchets up a step every time you think it has finished. Island released it in May 1993.

Liner notes insist there are no samples, keyboards or synthesizers anywhere on the record, which means every siren and scratch is Tom Morello's guitar. Killing In The Name is a drop-D riff, a full stop, and then the most quoted ninety seconds of the decade. The sleeve carries Malcolm Browne's 1963 photograph from Saigon. Epic, November 1992.

Conceived as a track-by-track answer to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., cut with Brad Wood at Idful Music in Chicago and released by Matador. Fuck and Run pairs a plain two-chord strum with the flattest, most exhausted vocal on the album, and that flatness does all the work. Spotify's edition appends three unreleased B-sides after Strange Loop.

Ric Ocasek of the Cars produced the debut at Electric Lady in New York, which is why the harmonies stack like a power-pop record rather than a grunge one. Say It Ain't So keeps its verses on a clean chorused arpeggio and saves every decibel of distortion for the chorus. Everyone calls it the Blue Album; Spotify just calls it Weezer.

Kim Deal started the band on Pixies downtime and brought in her twin sister Kelley, who learned guitar as they went. Cannonball opens on a distorted count-in through a ruined microphone, then a bass line swaggers in a couple of bars before anything else agrees to show up. 4AD, August 1993; the single reached number two on Billboard's Modern Rock chart.

Perry Farrell's cover sculpture got the record refused by several US chains, so Warner Bros. issued a plain white alternative sleeve printed with the text of the First Amendment. Three Days runs past ten minutes on Eric Avery's bass ostinato before Dave Navarro is finally let off the leash. Dave Jerden produced. Spotify capitalises it Ritual De Lo Habitual.

Flood and Alan Moulder came aboard for the double: twenty-eight songs across two discs, sequenced as Dawn to Dusk and Twilight to Starlight. Tonight, Tonight opens on a string section drawn from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, holds for half a minute, and then Jimmy Chamberlin's drums arrive at full tilt. Virgin released it in October 1995.

Their first record for DGC after years on SST and Blast First, with a Raymond Pettibon ballpoint drawing on the sleeve. Kool Thing sets Kim Gordon's needling verse against Chuck D of Public Enemy answering in monosyllables, over a riff Thurston Moore keeps declining to resolve. Border case: noise rock that major-label money accidentally made radio-adjacent.

Border case, and the most electronic thing on this list: Nellee Hooper, Tricky, Graham Massey of 808 State and Howie B all produced tracks, and some of it was recorded in the Bahamas. Army of Me is one distorted synth-bass figure repeated for four minutes while Björk sings over the top like she is issuing instructions. One Little Indian, 1995.

Eight songs and close to fifty minutes, and Doug Martsch scrapped an entire earlier version before Warner Bros. got this one. Randy Described Eternity spends its first two minutes stacking guitar lines over a low drone and refuses to hurry the payoff. Their major-label debut, and the point where indie guitar bands remembered long songs were allowed.

Greg Dulli wrote it as a single narrative about a relationship coming apart, and Elektra put it out in October 1993 after the band left Sub Pop. Debonair opens on a clean, almost polite guitar figure for eight bars, then the rhythm section comes in hard enough to make those bars feel like a trap.

Shirley Manson was fronting Angelfish when Butch Vig caught the video on MTV's 120 Minutes; she joined him, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson, and the album was assembled at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin. Only Happy When It Rains is a joke told with a straight face, all descending riff and drum loop and refusal to smile.

Last Pixies record before the split in 1993, produced by Gil Norton and packed with more keyboards and more speed than anything they had done before. Alec Eiffel is a two-minute tribute to the engineer Gustave Eiffel with a synthesizer blurting over Joey Santiago's guitar. 4AD in Britain, Elektra in America, September 1991.

Bob Mould's trio with David Barbe and Malcolm Travis, and Melody Maker named it album of the year for 1992, an odd fate for a man plenty of people had written off after Hüsker Dü. If I Can't Change Your Mind hangs a jangling acoustic strum inside the distortion and lets the melody carry everything. Creation in Britain, Rykodisc in America.